by Lindsay Amos7/20/2022

Outside of the YC community, little has been documented on best practices to be an effective CEO. We want to help founders everywhere scale and build enduring companies — and today, we’re launching a new series to do just that: Learnings of a CEO.

by Lindsay Amos3/30/2021

We’ve been talking about the unique challenges facing women founders for years,but the pandemic was particularly hard for women looking to start their owncompanies. According to recent data,funding to women-founded companies dropped from 2.8% in 2019 to 2.3% in 2020.

by Lindsay Amos3/26/2021

Pheadra Ellis-Lamkins, Co-Founder and CEO of Promise ,had witnessed technology’s impact on the work communities in which she’d been apart — and not always for good. In the labor force and the environment sector,she’d seen technology replace jobs, relegating janitors and receptionists tocontract work. In the music industry, she’d seen artists’ content devalued withadvances in digital innovation. “I went into tech to understand it,” she said.

by Lindsay Amos3/15/2021

The deadline to apply to the Y Combinator Summer 2021 batch is Friday, March 19 at 8pm PT. Due to COVID-19,Summer 2021 will be the third batch in a row to be fully remote.We occasionally get questions about what a remote batch is like. Our 2020 Yearin Review is helpful here,and I thought I’d include some quotes from when I asked founders from Summer2020 (our first all remote batch) about their experience.

by Lindsay Amos2/25/2021

Edlyft co-founder and CEO Erika Hairston never imaginedherself as a “techie,” but was drawn to computer science while at YaleUniversity—not that it was a cinch for her. “I actually really struggled throughthe major and almost dropped it,” she says. While she ultimately persevered andgraduated with her computer science degree from Yale in 2018, she also builtappreciation for what it’s like to be truly intimidated by a subject matter.

by Lindsay Amos2/23/2021

Songe LaRon didn’t have experience working in the barbershop world when he firsthad the idea for Squire , a business management andpoint-of-sales software focusing on barbershop owners. He did, however, havefirsthand knowledge of the customer experience.Beginning at the age of six or seven, LaRon started frequenting the barber withhis dad. Twenty years later, he realized the industry hadn’t evolved much. “Itwas very inefficient,” he said.